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Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

(danieldelaney.net)
858 points cryptophreak | 3 comments | 04 Feb 25 16:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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themanmaran ◴[04 Feb 25 17:19 UTC] No.42935503[source]▶
I'm surprised that the article (and comments) haven't mentioned Cursor.

Agreed that copy pasting context in and out of ChatGPT isn't the fastest workflow. But Cursor has been a major speed up in the way I write code. And it's primarily through a chat interface, but with a few QOL hacks that make it way faster:

1. Output gets applied to your file in a git-diff style. So you can approve/deny changes.

2. It (kinda) has context of your codebase so you don't have to specify as much. Though it works best when you explicitly tag files ("Use the utils from @src/utils/currency.ts")

3. Directly inserting terminal logs or type errors into the chat interface is incredibly convenient. Just hover over the error and click the "add to chat"

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1. patrickaljord ◴[04 Feb 25 17:36 UTC] No.42935766[source]▶
Instead of Cursor I would recommend two open source alternatives that you can combine: https://www.continue.dev/ and https://github.com/cline/cline
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2. freeone3000 ◴[04 Feb 25 17:43 UTC] No.42935869[source]▶
It’s not nearly as slick. cursor’s indexing and integration are significant value-adds.
3. coder543 ◴[04 Feb 25 22:20 UTC] No.42939810[source]▶
I used Continue before Cursor. Cursor’s “agent” composer mode is so much better than what Continue offered. The agent can automatically grep the codebase for relevant files and then read them. It can create entirely new files from scratch. I can still manually provide some files as context, but it’s not usually necessary. With Continue, everything was very manual.

Cursor also does a great job of showing inline diffs of what composer is doing, so you can quickly review every change.

I don’t think there’s any reason Continue can’t match these features, but it hadn’t, last I checked.

Cursor also focuses on sane defaults, which is nice. The tab completion model is very good, and the composer model defaults to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which is arguably the best non-reasoning code model. (One would hope that Cursor gets agent-composer working with reasoning models soon.) Continue felt much more technical… which is nice for power users, but not always the best starting place.